PARENTING PLUS:Empathy can promote emotional wellbeing
LAST WEEK I wrote about how trauma, and indeed any kind of emotional stress, can lead children to opt out or try to block “bad” or difficult feelings. Many of these “blocking” behaviours can be negative or self-destructive (alcohol, drugs, self-harm, withdrawal, etc). So this week I will offer some ideas for responding to your children to help them to sort out their feelings in more healthy ways.
When children struggle with feelings that are causing them a lot of hurt, they find it hard to deal with, or process, those feelings. Often this is because they can’t marry the nature, or the intensity, of the feeling with the experience they have had. Indeed, in the query that I have responded to on page nine today it is possible that this is what is happening for the nine-year-old girl with anxiety.
In offering emotional support to children, what you are trying to do is to offer them a good fit between their true feelings and the event (or events) which is leading to those feelings. Sometimes the event is traumatic, but more often it is just the day-to-day trials and tribulations of childhood. I consider this “fit” to be emotional congruence.
To give a simple example of what I mean by emotional congruence I’d like you to imagine a scenario where your four-year-old son comes to you with a small cut on his knee after falling while playing outside.
When he comes in crying about the soreness of his knee, an emotionally congruent response is to empathise with him about his sore knee. So you might say something like, “Oh, you poor wee lad, that cut on your knee looks really sore.”
Immediately, the description that you suggest of “soreness” fits for your son, and he will indeed truly experience the soreness of his knee and the feeling will intensify briefly.
However, by truly feeling the emotion he can process it and move on from it, and you will find that after an especially loud howl of pain he will recover his equilibrium and the pain will subside quickly.
However, imagine you had been very busy and so after a cursory inspection of the cut you had responded to him by saying, “You’re all right, your knee is fine, it is just a graze; off you go.” Your son will continue to experience the pain but this time there is no fit between what you have suggested (“you’re all right”) and the soreness he feels.
This second example is, in fact, one of emotional discrepancy or incongruence. In this example, his pain will linger on, much longer, and the feeling gets stuck because it has not been validated (indeed his real feeling of pain has been invalidated by your comment).
This painful feeling might stay with him until he blocks it out by distracting himself.
Our task, therefore, whenever we are faced with our children’s traumas and stresses, is to help them to find the fit between their feelings and what has happened to them. Only when we correctly associate a feeling to an event, thereby acknowledging and validating the feeling, can we can let it go.
We parents need to be alert to our children’s feelings, even if their experiences are not particularly traumatic.
This sometimes means that we need to acknowledge our own feelings first and begin to make sense of them, so that we can then attend to regulating our children’s emotions (a bit like putting on your own life jacket before helping your child into theirs).
By labelling feelings for our children and empathising with their struggles, we offer them greater opportunity for emotional health and wellbeing later in life.
In the short term too, helping them to make sense of their feelings can reduce a lot of negative or self-destructive behaviour; if they don’t have to misbehave to block out a feeling, then more positive behaviours can emerge.